The White Queen, Philippa Gregory, Simon and Schuster, 2009
The White Queen is the first in Gregory’s series of historical novels concerning the Wars of the Roses; the war between the houses of Lancaster and York, sometimes known as the Cousins War. It’s a turbulent, complex and chaotic period of British history characterised by battles for the crown, shifting political alliances, betrayals, plots, murder and intrigue. Gregory takes Elizabeth Woodville, wife of Edward IV of York and mother to the princes in the tower as her lodestar to portray the period 1464-1485 through Elizabeth’s experiences and her perspective.
Philippa Gregory’s historical novels are always thoroughly researched and usually accurate in their period detail. She has remarked that in preparation for writing The White Queen she became a researcher in military history and the end result for some readers was too great an emphasis throughout the novel on the machinations of the battlefield – many battlefields in fact! She also weaves into an otherwise factual rendering of Elizabeth’s story, a changeling pageboy to posit an explanation for the disappearance of her youngest son, Richard. There is some historical evidence for Richard’s ‘escape’ but it is extremely tenuous. The story of the princes in the tower, surrounded as it is with myth, is nevertheless fertile ground for the novelist and Gregory takes up this thread in a later novel in the series.
Notwithstanding the female perspective that Gregory adopts in the novel, some also found the depiction of Elizabeth as a strong woman, a determined queen and a fearless mother but utterly powerless without her husband’s protection, to be oppressively stereotypical – a true depiction, perhaps, but an uncomfortable one.
Historical novels may afford powerful insight to past times and past lives but on balance this book did not resonate with or enlighten most of our readers.